Immobile Apple

It’s 11:33 a.m. Friday. Approximately 66 and a half hours since Apple Support acknowledged receipt of my request for help on syncing calendar and contact data from my iMac to the “cloud,’’ i.e., MobileMe servers wherever they are. Re-request sent after 48 hours. Still nothing. In meantime, the basic fixes worked – halfway. Rebooting, emptying browser cache and resyncing the data cleared up the problems with (a) syncing iCal data from iMac to MobileMe (b) recording events on MobileMe on a Safari browser, without the events disappearing when clicked on. But I’ve still got zero contacts in my MobileMe Address Book. Very useful, for a mobile me. Not. Of course, here it is, a week into the well-hyped introduction of this latest version of Apple’s Web applications and they’re still not working. A quick check of the Apple MobileMe Support page provides this clue:

“MobileMe members are currently unable to use Contacts with MobileMe Mail on the web. Accessing MobileMe Contacts directly, by visiting me.com/contacts, is not affected. Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

Not quite true. Accessing MobileMe Contacts directly shows … no contacts at all. More is amiss than Apple acknowledges, methinks. Certainly, more than it yet can respond to. We already know that MobileMe is not what it was cracked up to be. It’s not doing constant syncing in the cloud. It’s doing intermittent syncing in the cloud. That’s not what it originally promised. But it’s not even doing a great job of syncing, when you manually ask it to. After you figure out it’s not your ability to hit “sync” that’s lame – or find a fix – you realize it’s the software and the system that is lame. The way-slow response time? Clearly, Apple is having a brain freeze, right now. It’s trying to do too much. Ambition, right now, has outstretched grasp. Time for Apple to slow down, get control, so it can release solid products, provide serious support and turn on customers (quite literally in the iPhone 3G case), rather than turn them off. Of course, Apple can fix its problems in and behind the cloud. MobileMe probably won’t be the 12th technology the list of Apple’s failures. In the meantime, a file stored on a USB memory stick would do a better job of letting me go mobile with my contacts. PHOTO SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons